I thought that I would journal and welcome you into the experience and adventure of costume play (otherwise known as cosplay) for the very first time. Many of these terms are new to me, so if you don't know what they mean either, that's ok - I'll try my best to define and describe the terms in my limited capacity. Cosplaying means that a person dresses up in a character from a movie, book and/or video game. I guess you can describe the people who dress in Disney characters at Disneyland are cosplaying. However, cosplay also extends into cultures like the Japanese who have Anime (which is a style of Japanese film or television animation).

I must admit, when I first volunteered to help out at the Anime North 2015 KigurumiOnline booth sponsored by Ride the Pig Studios - I was a little naive. I honestly thought I was going to be in my street clothes handing out flyers or something. Then again, perhaps they were just trying to gently ease me into this whole…

Written by SofaPhotographs by various folks and crediting them all would take too much effort

The following is a chronicle of Anime North 2015 - intended to be the largest gathering of kigurumi cosplayers in North America - pieced together from what bits of my memory I can scrape from off the inside of my skull. Please bear with me as I leave out entire sections of the event or replace them with blatant misinformation.

.......Late May had rolled around. For me, that meant final exams. Anxiety hung in the air around me like my permeating body-odor, and my classmates could smell both of them. They thought they understood: Finals are a stressful affair, in which many fancy numbers on official-looking documents hang in the balance. Yet I wasn't concerned with finals. As far as I could tell, I had that shit in the bag. In fact, my putrescent emissions of worry were directed at what would come afterward, on Memorial Day weekend in Toronto, Canada.